Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee
At first, I resisted.
I told Fuller prof Tim Kelly that I didn't really think going out to lunch with government types from the Consulate General of the People's Republic of China in Los Angeles was a good idea.
On the surface, it was an opportunity for dialogue about the Beijing Olympics Rose Parade float issue.
But I told Tim that it reminded me of when our reporter Gene Maddaus outed KTLA staffers staying for free at the Huntington Hotel, which resulted in the renaming of the gabfest from "Morning News" to "Morning Show" and in a memo from the Chicago head office to thousands of Tribune Company employees reminding them of journalistic ethical standards. After we ran Gene's column, the KTLA news director -- er, show director -- asked me over to the newsroom for a tour. No thanks, I said.
But Tuesday Editorial Page Editor Steve Scauzillo and I went to lunch anyway with Tim and Yue Chen and Ingrid Luo Wang of the consulate's Political and Press Section.
I used the opportunity to get extra high and mighty about freedom, democracy and the like. In fact, I'd been ginned up in the car by listening to a radio report on the BBC's "The World" about the asinine, ass-covering answers Yahoo execs gave Congress Tuesday about their complicity in helping hunt down Chinese dissidents who soon thereafter were imprisoned for a decade for "illegally providing state secrets to foreign entities."
What did Chinese citizens Wang Xiaoning and Shi Tao really do? Forwarded an e-mail to the West from Chinese authorities demanding that the press ignore the 15th anniversary of the Tiananmen Square massacre.
So I ranted and raved, and we ate our McCormick & Schmick's fish.
When I was done, Wang, the boss, after listening politely, said: "Trade is a better way to expose us to democracy." She excused crackdowns by adding: "We attach a great deal of importance to political stability." You surely do.
Kelly, who teaches every year in Shanghai, and who has been retained by Avery Dennison to help the company with its PR problems over the float issue, said that his friends in China say China needs to go slow when it comes to lifting censorship because its people are worried -- get this -- about allowing another Cultural Revolution to reverse the relative openness now enjoyed.
Wang, naturally, concurred: "In 20 years, China has changed into another political animal entirely" compared to the years of Mao, she said, not without validity.
But in the end, nonsense. It's not the Chinese left-wingers who are censorious now -- it's the right-wingers who want business stability. Our corporations probably think that the autocratic system -- no Environmental Impact Reports here, guys! -- run out of Beijing looks pretty good. American CEOS would happily join the Communist Party if it meant a slightly better bottom line.
But Wang and Chen insisted reports that the Chinese government put any money at all into the Olympics float are wrong. The government-associated group in the San Gabriel Valley that has contributed has received no money from the mainland, they say.
Anyway, nice folks, just doing their political jobs. We told them that some kind of protest would likely go on during the parade. And that if the Chinese government had just ignored Falun Gong, the movement would barely ever have been heard of in the West. Wang agreed. She wondered about whether if there are human rights panels held in the area between now and New Year's, if participating would imply that the government rather than the Olympics types had something to do with the float. I said that was a good question but encouraged her to participate anyway. I hope there are such panels.
They must be pretty well thought of back home to get the L.A. posting. Wang tried to show me she's cool with the openness bit by saying she's been to underground Christian church services with a friend in Beijing, and lived to tell the tale. Chen uses the name Isadora in the West. Both come from near Shanghai and have been speaking English since elementary school.
I told them I hoped we could talk again before the parade. Next time we'll take them to Yujean Kang's on Raymond in Old Pas for Yujean's untraditional take on traditional Chinese food.
If the boys in Beijing are picking up Public Eye from Pasadena on the Venus line: Censor this, Politburo! You've got nothing to lose but fear itself for a billion Chinese.
Comments
yeah like two servants of a totalitarian state wouldn't lie about anything. "oh yes create a larger foreign trade deficit with us to teach us democracy." please.
that float is bought and paid for with indirect blackmail....Avery has all of its supersecret high speed label making equipment and adhesive formulas inside mainland China now so Avery is totally at their mercy because the Chinese could steal their intellectual property in an eyeblink. Avery has already admitted in its SEC filings that its employees inside China have violated the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act.
Posted by: Anonymous | November 6, 2007 7:50 PM
In 1936, pretty blonde faces told us in perfect German accented English that nobody was going to persecute Jews, Gypsies and Homosexuals, either.
Mike
Posted by: Sharkey | November 6, 2007 8:39 PM
Vetty interesting, Larry. I wonder what will come of this.
Posted by: Miss Havisham | November 7, 2007 11:36 AM
I joined the effort to stop the float because my mother, a retired high-school teacher in Beijing and a Falun Gong practitioner, was arrested on 12/15/06 due to Beijing Government’s cleansing the city for 2008 Olympic.
I am very disappointed by the fact that the Pasadena city council fear to confront the Chinese communist party regarding its deteriorating human rights conditions. But I still hope that the Mayor and the Council Members can help me to rescue my mom.
Posted by: Yaning Liu | November 7, 2007 11:43 AM
Larry,
I truly admire your courage to let people know about the meeting with Chinese consulate and you persistence to your principles as a journalist.
Many Chinese local media told me that they can not talk about the Falun Gong or the Chinese consulate will punish them.
I do not know which media the Chinese consulate will contact next. They always show people the business opportunities and money in one hand; and a stick on the other hand.
I recommend people to watch the video at http://www.humanrightstorch.org/news/videos
so that they can see the true face of Chinese communist party.
Thanks!
Posted by: John Li | November 7, 2007 2:36 PM
It must have been an interesting meeting. So glad to hear they think that business is helping things move forward. Many beg to differ.
Would like to share an article from the NY Times - Oct 1, 1999 written by the late and great AM Rosenthal. He'd never be silent on this! Schmooze away - keep up with your parlor tricks - but the power of justice will prevail!
Here it is:
St. Joseph's Murder
The beginning of the amateur video shows the first day of worship in the handsome new church -- the congregation taking communion from the Catholic priests. The film is dated Feb. 14, 1999.
Then it flows without a break into a section filmed April 27, 1999. The film lurches as the person with the camera, sometimes hiding in a building across the street, struggles to show what remains of the church.
A metal dinosaur appears. Its huge black iron head tears out windows, smashes great holes into walls. What's that continuing thump-thump in the background? No explanation until laborers are seen with sledgehammers pounding floors into splinters. The head continuously crashes itself into what had been St. Joseph's Roman Catholic Church, in Fuzhou, province of Fujian, People's Republic of China.
Built over five years with the muscle and love of the worshipers, and dollars and coins of their relatives in America, the church in one day has become rubble.
I got and saw the film on Wednesday, while hundreds of top American and European business executives were attending a Shanghai "economic forum," sponsored by Fortune and its owner, Time Warner, with the blessing and manipulation of the Politburo, to celebrate the 50th anniversary of Mao's victory, and the decades of despotism by massacre that followed.
Everything pertinent to trade was on the agenda, except the rights of Chinese. The C.E.O.'s and company presidents, and Fortune and Time Warner, either judged these rights to have no value in any balance sheet, were foot-kissing the Politburo, or both.
My disgust turned to shame for America when I read Seth Faison's story in The New York Times about how the head of Time Warner, which also owns CNN, gave the Chinese President a bust of Lincoln and praised him for his parlor trick of reciting the Gettysburg Address!
The chief of the American International Group, an insurance giant, said it was not human rights China needed, but food. Chinese do have enough food, but I invite the insurance man to a dinner that will include a dish sometimes served to Chinese political prisoners -- rice in a toilet bucket.
I would give each executive a cassette of the murder of St. Joseph's. But I promised not to show it around, because Chinese police could identify congregants who walked sorrowfully in the rubble.
Anyway, the foreign executives know what is going on, how Chinese Catholics and Protestants are arrested and beaten if they do not say the right prayers in Government-registered churches under Government-approved bishops. St. Joseph's would not register with the Communist Religious Affairs Bureau.
Even without the cassette, the executives know, they know. They just do not give a damn.
I am asked why I write often about religious persecution of Christians, since I am a Jew, and not even religiously educated. One simple reason is sufficient: sufferings of the religious are as painful as of the secular.
But there is another -- neither religious nor secular freedoms will flourish where one is denied. Only if religious and secular Americans grasp that will a human rights movement exist in America that can protect them all.
Many people buoyed me when I wrote, particularly John Cardinal O'Connor. He sustains all who struggle for freedom, sometimes without the enthusiasm of his peers. Among Catholic, Protestant and Jewish clergy in America, some speak up against religious persecution abroad -- and some look away.
When I was an apprentice reporter covering sermons for $3 a Sunday, I did not appreciate assignment to St. Patrick's, now Cardinal O'Connor's seat. Two collection plates were presented, one before you could get down the aisle. But I will never again duck two collections, not at St. Patrick's.
St. Joseph's was destroyed because its congregation and priests refused to submit themselves to Communist domination. And so were 16 other churches in and near Fujian.
No film has surfaced except of St. Joseph's. Some views are shown at www.freechurchforchina.org.
One day there will be cameras, lots, when St. Joseph's and the others reopen in freedom. Cardinal O'Connor will be there; guaranteed. So will other Americans who understand that Chinese really want more than rice and chains.
Posted by: Ann | November 7, 2007 6:58 PM